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One in every four complaints made to the city’s 311 call centre in October was for missed garbage pickup, a Star analysis has found. (Interactive map, above, updated Dec. 9.)

In fact, almost half the 21,518 service calls to the civic hotline over a month were about garbage. There were 5,749 complaints of missed curbside collection of one kind or another, and 3,828 calls for other garbage-related issues, such as bin exchanges.

The calls came in the same month that Rob Ford was elected mayor following a campaign in which he promised to aggressively pursue privatization of city services, such as garbage pickup, and improve customer service.

Ford’s home base of Etobicoke already has privatized garbage collection — a holdover from its pre-amalgamation days — which saves the city $1.8 million a year, according to a 2007 audit.

The data, compiled from calls for service made between Oct. 7 and Nov. 7, does not indicate the validity of any complaint or show how a problem was resolved.

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But if 311 complaints are any indication of customer satisfaction, Etobicoke gets roughly the same level of service as the rest of the city: 13 per cent of complaints for missed collection came from the borough, which has 14 per cent of Toronto’s households.

“I expect the debate (on privatizing garbage collection) will occur,” said Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, who was recently tapped by Ford to chair the public works committee, which oversees garbage collection, among other city services. “This administration is interested in ways in which we can find more efficient ways of delivering better service at a lower cost.”

Ford refused comment through his spokeswoman Adrienne Batra.

Minnan-Wong added that if there are a disproportionate number of complaints about garbage, he will “look at the reasons why and try to get those numbers down.”

But the man in charge of picking up the city’s garbage and recycling said there’s good reason why his department generates the most complaints.

“We visit every house in the city at least once a week,” said Robert Orpin, director of collections in the city’s solid waste management division. “We have lots of opportunity to interact with the public on any given day, so that’s what drives up the number.”

The service call data represents only a small portion of all calls to 311, which has logged more than 1.1 million calls since it was launched on Sept. 24, 2009. Most calls — typically more than 75 per cent — are information requests and general inquiries, which are not catalogued or tracked the way service calls are.

The 311 service also currently service requests for only five city divisions — Toronto Water, solid waste management, transportation, municipal licensing and standards, and urban forestry — so the data represents a segment of the city’s services.

(It has been gradually expanding its roster of services over the past year and will add two more city divisions next month.)

The call centre also answers questions via email, fax and Twitter. Service requests can also be made online through 311’s website.

According to the data in our study month, the most calls came from the densely populated Beach neighbourhood, but on a per-capita basis, the leading complainers came from North Toronto and Leaside.

Although the call centre is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, the data show that 90 per cent of the calls come Monday to Friday, and 85 per cent between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m.

“Every Monday morning I can see the queue building because (callers) think the government’s only open the typical banker hours,” said Toronto 311 director Neil Evans.

Even complaints about excessive noise and reports of water-related “emergencies” come in more frequently between 9 a.m. and noon than any other time.

“If you’re clearing out your garage and you’ve got a couch or something you want to be picked up, you don’t have to wait until Monday morning to call us — call us Saturday morning or Saturday night or 3 o’clock in the morning, you won’t get a lineup and neither will anybody else.”

Its call data and performance statistics are not publicly available at the moment, but Evans said they are working with the city’s Open Data project — an initiative that encourages collaboration and innovation by making government data accessible online — and will begin sharing as much information as possible about the service over the next few months.

“This kind of information, if it isn’t private, if it isn’t personal, it should be public,” Evans said. “We could have people out there creating tools which we either don’t have the ability to … or just haven’t thought about yet.”

An international movement, dubbed Open311, is pushing for a coordinated effort by cities to build standardized, fully transparent and interactive, web-based 311 systems for citizens to report non-emergency issues, with the aim of creating a more efficient and responsive local government.

Evans said Toronto’s 311 is still maturing in its data collection, but he hopes it will be a leader with regard to Open Data. Next month the service is putting its “knowledge base” — the information database its agents use to answer questions — online, so users logging in to the city’s 311 website will be able to use the same tools as the call takers. “The public will be able to self-serve,” Evans said.

As for service requests, some can already be made online — such as potholes — and there are plans to expand to other services over the coming months.

311 STATS FROM OCT. 7 TO NOV. 7

104,238: Calls answered (not including email, fax, mail and online)

82,720: General inquiries

21,518: Complaints and service requests

45: Average number of seconds callers spent in queue before their call was answered (last week’s average was 18 seconds; staff say the Oct. 25 election skewed the average during the sample period)

3,350: Average number of calls per day

10,943: Calls answered on Oct. 25, election day

TOP 5 COMPLAINTS

1. Missed garbage pickup

This city is sensitive about its garbage, and with good reason. In light of last year’s six-week garbage strike, even one uncollected bag can sting the nostrils with bad memories. Maybe that’s why missed garbage and recycling collection was far and away the leading complaint to 311 during our study month. When combined with missed furniture pickup the calls comprise more than one quarter of all complaint-and-service-related calls to the city’s info hotline.

High Park led the way with 199 calls in the month, followed by the Guildwood-West Hill area, which called 108 times.

The city’s director of collection services, Robert Orpin, said there are a number of reasons why someone’s garbage or recycling might be missed — the wrong day may be chief among them.

“It might not have been garbage day, it might be recycling day.”

When you call in to 311 and complain that your garbage wasn’t picked up, the first thing the call taker will ask you is where you live and whether or not your neighbours have put their garbage out.

The most common resident mistakes are mixing up garbage and recycling weeks, putting the bins out on the wrong day altogether, setting your trash out too late, or calling in to the city before the workers have even reached your neighbourhood. Other reasons why your trash might be left behind is when it’s considered too heavy or contaminated.

The 311 data can’t tell us who’s to blame for the missed collections, but Orpin admits that it’s not always the residents’ fault. “[City workers] may just miss it,” he said. “There may be construction on the street. There might have been something blocking [the garbage bins] so they couldn’t see it.”

Orpin said his garbage collectors will generally take people at their word if they say their bins were missed and in most cases will make a trip back to pick it up. “If we’re in the area … we try to ensure the stuff is picked up and picked up on the day people put it out.”

In October and November, one of the main causes of missed collections was the “enormous” amounts of leaf and yard waste, Orpin said.

“It’s simply a large volume and my staff are working late. … It just takes a lot longer to get through it.”

2. Property bylaw investigations

Complaints that fall into the property investigations category cover everything from neighbours snitching on each other about lawn junk, to chilly tenants trying to get their landlords to turn up the heat, to rooming-house rumours.

Here are the leading causes of property standards complaints to 311.

• Storage of junk and debris on private property

• Long grass and weeds

• Possible rooming house use

• Zoning violations, such as an auto repair business operating out of a residence

• Noise bylaw violations

• Graffiti on private property

• No or inadequate heat in rental property

• Pest control issues in multi-residential property

• Violations of the fence bylaw governing private property fences

All of the complaints are investigated by the city’s Municipal Standards and Licensing department.

We also lumped in “waste enforcement” complaints, which include reports of illegal sewer dumps, complaints about unsorted garbage on commercial property and any other cases where the city’s garbage police might be called in. There were 222 such calls during our study month to go along with more than 1,000 property investigations.

3. Missed furniture pickup

Not all discarded furniture is created equal in the eyes of the city’s garbage collectors, which may explain why missed furniture pickup accounted for the second-most complaints made to 311 during our study period.

A mattress, a footstool and a toilet may be put out to the curb together, but they will be separated before they reach their final resting place.

Naturally, this confuses people.

“We may show up at a property and take all the furniture but leave four or five mattresses,” said Robert Orpin, the city’s director of collection services.

Orpin says a second truck typically comes back later in the day to get the mattresses, but people often assume the items have been left behind.

People also often forget to separate a toilet’s tank from its bowl — which is required to prevent workers from unsafe heavy lifting — so those can be left behind, too.

The end of the month is also a busy time for furniture collection, especially in parts of the city concentrated with renters. Orpin admits that some moving days, his workers are overwhelmed. “We may not be able to get it all on the one day.”

Asked to explain why a disproportionate number of calls came from Scarborough, Orpin said the city started using new automated trucks in Scarborough in October, which had trouble picking up bulkier items. A second truck came later in the day to get any missed items, but complaints to 311 were already made.

4. Roads and potholes

The meat-and-potatoes of civic complaints, roads and potholes comprised almost four per cent of the complaints to 311 for our study period.

After making sure there aren’t any duplicate reports, the call taker will ask you to describe the size and location of your pothole so it can be ascribed something akin to a threat level, which determines response time.

“A pothole on a side street is different than a pothole on the Gardiner,” explains 311 manager Neil Evans.

The call taker will then give you a service standard time — five days for the average pothole to be investigated and repaired — and a service request number so you can track the progress online or by calling 311.

5. Blocked sewers

Backed up sewers made up three-and-a-half per cent of all complaints and service calls to 311 for the month we studied.

According to Toronto Water, sewers and drains are often blocked by tree roots. If the tree is on city property, city workers will clear the blockage. If it’s your tree you can apply to the city for a grant to help clear a path. 311 should be able to help you out with that.

STAFF COMPLIMENTS/COMPLAINTS

Over the 32 days of data we looked at, 543 calls came in that fall into the category of staff compliment or complaint: 20 of those were recorded as compliments, 90 as “comment or complaint” and 433 as complaints, either about city staff or contractors.

311 Operations Manager Patricia MacDonell said people will sometimes call back to applaud staff for the speed with which a problem was solved. Far more frequently — about 25 times more frequently — people will call back to complain about a worker’s bad attitude, a project wasn’t completed or was only completed part way.

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